This isn't a particularly interesting or dramatic post, I just really needed to vent to someone about this very frustrating situation at my weekend job.
I work as a courtesy clerk for a major American grocery retailer in a Midwestern city of about 100,000 people. This used to be my full-time job, bit after getting an office job earlier this year, it's now a job I do on the weekend for a bit of extra spending money. I worked at this store throughout the entirety pandemic, which is where this entire situation began.
Now the store I worked at used to have about 200 shopping carts in all. This meant that at the end of the day, when the carts were all put away, there would be three full rows of carts that would stretch from the back of the cart bay all the way up to the edge of the automatic doors as well as one long row outside that ran the entire length of the wall on the other side of the cart bay. There was also about 30 little carts as well. This meant that we had more than enough carts on an average shopping day, and a bunch of extra in reserves when things got busy on the weekend. Even when things got very busy, it was unusual for the cart bay to be empty, so long as the courtesy clerk on cart duty was doing their job. And even when the bay was empty, this typically meant that all of the cart corrals outside were bulging at the seams with discarded carts waiting to be brought in and the bay would soon have a decent amount of carts in it once more after one or two people got back on it.
For the most part, our stock of carts was pretty consistent, with there being twenty carts, at most, broken and waiting for repairs at any given time. We would also have issue from time to time with cart thefts, usually by people with no car of their own pushing their carts full of groceries back to our local low-income apartments and just never bringing them back. But usually we'd have enough good Samaritans willing to bring the carts back to mitigate this issue. This all changed, however, during the pandemic…
It started in the summer of 2020 when I began to notice that the row of carts that we kept outside of the store was a little short at the end of the day. Then gradually, it started getting shorter and shorter. I informed both my supervisor and management, but they brushed me off and didn’t really think anything of it. So the months went on, and by the end of the summer, that row of carts that we kept outside of the store was gone, and more carts went missing as time went on.
As the year drew to a close, we no longer had enough carts to keep the cart bay fully stocked. All but about ten of our little carts had been stolen and we only had enough large carts to fill up a bit less two-and-a-half rows and were starting to struggle on very busy days to keep the cart bay full. Management was starting to take notice, at first yelling at us for not working fast enough before slowly realizing that they had a real issue on their hands.
So at this point you would expect them to start taking countermeasures, right? Start studying the security camera to identify people who are taking carts off of lots, try to figure out where they are ending up, all that good stuff. Yeah no. No effort on management’s part was ever made to try to identify the cart thieves or figure out where the carts were ending up
For awhile I did try to take it upon myself to see if I could locate the carts and found out a few details including that it was likely the same group of four or five people who was stealing our carts to transport their groceries home and they were discarding them at the local low-income apartments, where people claimed to see them all the time. Unfortunately, whenever I went over there myself to check, I wouldn’t find anything. To this day, we have no idea where those carts are ending up. The scrapyard claims that they don’t take stuff with company logos on them, they aren’t showing up on Craigslist, so it really is a mystery. My dad says he once heard some crackpot call into some local radio station to talk about how meth dealers were supposedly using shopping carts to move their products, so maybe that’s where they ended up? Who knows.
Fortunately, the manager at the time did eventually realize what a huge problem this was an decided to invest in a security system for the carts. This security system would ensure that the wheels would lock whenever shoplifters tried to take items out through the door without passing through the check lanes as well as whenever someone tried to remove a cart from the premises. Great, problem solved right? Well, obviously I wouldn’t be typing this if that were the case…
Turns out the manager overlooked a rather significant detail: in order for perimeter locks on the carts to engage, a wire would need to be buried around the edge of the parking lot. This would mean paying over $50,000 to have the asphalt in the parking lot dug up so that they could bury the wire. Needless to say, this wasn’t in the budget. However, by the time he had realized his mistake, the installation of these new wheels was well underway and he couldn’t pull out. So, we had a fancy-new anti-shoplifitng system for our our carts, but still had absolutely no means of preventing the theft of the carts themselves. Oh well, at the very least the panicked look on the faces of shoplifters when they realize that they’ve been caught when the wheels lock and the alarms went off proved to be very satisfying.
After this, management pretty much gave up an any attempt to prevent cart theft. The only thing they did was submit requests to the higher-ups for more shopping carts, which went ignored for months on end. Our cart supply would dwindle down to the point where we had about a row-and-a-half of carts left until they finally resupplied a full year after the cart thefts began. Unfortunately, they only sent us 50 carts, and we needed 100 to replace everything that was lost. What’s worse: those carts they sent us disappeared just as quickly as they came in.
As a brief aside, I will say that I find it very odd how long it takes for us to get new carts to us, and even when they come in, it’s not enough. I get that there are shortages right now and supply lines are messed up, but in most cases these periods of shortages are broken up with periods when things basically return to normal for a little while. But that has never happened with our cart supply. We just keep getting shafted over and over again as more and more of our carts get stolen.Anyway, I suppose I should bring this story to a close by fast-forwarding to the present day. As I said at the beginning of my post, I no longer work at this store full time, having got an office job earlier this year. And let me tell you, I’m so glad I got out when I did because the situation has gotten so bad that even being there one day a week stresses me out. We are now down to under 40 carts. Yes, that’s right: 40. Keep in mind that we are one of the busiest stores in the region and we can have well over 40 customers in our store at any given time during peak shopping hours, especially on weekends.
At any given time, the cart bay is most likely empty with maybe two or three carts available if we’re lucky. There are probably three to five carts out in the parking lot at any given time, which are usually picked up by other newly-arrived customers looking for cats. And given that this is a university town with over 100,000 people in it, we have quite a few non-regulars shopping at our store at any given day, meaning that I have to summarize everything that I’ve just explained to you hear in a few sentences or left when they ask, usually in a shocked tone, about what happened to our carts.
At this point, it’s become such an issue that hearing customers complain about it as they enter the store multiple times during a shift is basically guaranteed. We get customers complaining to supervisors and managers about it at least once a day, and even have a few Karens take out their anger on courtesy clerks over it. Apparently we’re supposed to be getting new carts in for the first time in months, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess that it’ll probably be just 50 more carts which will all disappear about a month later.
TL;DR: cart thefts in a grocery store shoot up during the pandemic and have been going on ever since. Management did nothing to look into the thefts or catch the culprits, the security system they invested in didn’t pan out due to an oversight, the higher-ups wouldn’t send carts often enough or in large enough numbers to make up for what was lost, and now there are so few carts in the store that during our peak hours customers have resorted to following outgoing customers to their cars so that they can get their carts.
Let me know down below if you’ve noticed anything similar happening at a store that you either work at or frequent.